George Hotz
Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.
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Where they publish
Blog the singularity is nearer His blog: “A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway.” Has a feed.
Recent
- I love LLMs, I hate hype 12 Jul 2026 I think from this blog you may misunderestimate how absolutely giddy I am about AI. I did hacking from 2007-2014, after that my whole career has been devoted to AI. I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs,…
- AI 2040 and the Cult of Intelligence 11 Jul 2026 I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming. Then I joined the real world and actually tried to do things. At comma, we ship a hardware produ…
- Liminality 23 Jun 2026 It’s crazy how much Fullmetal Alchemist mimics how AI is playing out. We pour human souls into a philosopher’s stone that we think will solve all our problems and cure death. It doesn’t exactly do this, but you can use…
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- The doom justifies the valuation 21 Jun 2026 I’ve been in Berkeley for the last 2 weeks. I haven’t really been back here for a while, and it’s worse than you can believe. This is a cult of atheistic hedonists needing AI doom to be true to justify their life choice…
- You don’t understand, prices can’t go down 18 Jun 2026 Since at least 2008, every time there’s an option to either make the money track real value or make sure things don’t go down, they chose the latter. As a result, money is increasingly uncoupled from reality.
- Summoning the Demon 17 Jun 2026 Watch you hit the stage like a willing bomb Strapped to crippled children It’s hard to watch you whore out your damaged pride I spit on what you’re building – The Stephen Hawking
- AI will be massively deflationary 11 Jun 2026 The funny thing about Anthropic haters is that they still mostly believe Anthropic’s marketing. They think Claude is a recursively self-improving silicon God, and that we are all a couple refusals away from falling into…
- Stairway to Heaven 7 Jun 2026 They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from…
- Our Great War is a Spiritual War 6 Jun 2026 I often come back to the question of why this is happening. Why do people want the centralized world? Why do people want the administered reality? Why do people want to be managed? Why do people not want root?
- The Eternal Sloptember 24 May 2026 I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t…
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 30 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Whether time really exists does not matter; what matters is that time is a useful model for describing reality.
I think time is a useful model, whether it exists or not. Right. Does quantum physics exist? Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s about whether it’s a useful model to describe reality.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
What makes a relationship worth having is the other person's quirks and small annoyances, which is exactly what we will edit out of artificial companions.
It is actually all their nuances and quirks and slight annoyances that make this relationship worthwhile. I don’t think we’re going to realize that until it’s too late.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Scaling up GPT will never produce AGI, because a model trained on cross-entropy loss cannot get there; reinforcement learning in rich environments is required.
When I talked about will GPT12 be AGI, my answer is no. Of course not. I mean, cross-entropy loss is never going to get you there. You need probably RL in fancy environments in order to get something that would be considered AGI-like.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
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Generative models will let us build media a person genuinely cannot look away from, and that is the likeliest way humanity ends.
We’re actually going to build that, I think, but it’s not going to be one static tape. I think the human brain is too complex to be stuck in one static tape like that. If you look at ant brains, maybe they can be stuck on a static tape, but we’re going to build that using generative models. We’re going to build the TikTok that you actually can’t look away from.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
We will build superintelligence long before we build anything as robust as a bird, because nothing we have built can survive in nature at all.
I think we’re going to build super intelligence before we build any sort of robustness in the AI. We cannot build an AI that is capable of going out into nature and surviving like a bird. A bird is an incredibly robust organism. We’ve built nothing like this. We haven’t built a machine that’s capable of reproducing.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Reproduction is the thing life is built on and the thing machines cannot do; for all its progress, the silicon stack is nowhere near reproducing itself.
There’s two stacks of life in the world. There’s the biological stack and the silicon stack. The biological stack starts with reproduction. Reproduction is at the absolute core. The first proto-RNA organisms were capable of reproducing. The silicon stack, despite, as far as it’s come, is nowhere near being able to reproduce.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Anyone who cannot write a full software stack for NVIDIA's generic GPUs has no chance of writing one for their own, more specialised, AI chip.
It’s always harder to write software for more specialized hardware. A GPU is pretty generic. If you can’t write an in Nvidia stack, there’s no way you can write a stack for your chip. My approach with Tinygrad is first write a performant NVIDIA stack.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
The single test to apply to any technology is whether it centralises power or decentralises it: the first is bad and the second is good.
my central thesis about the world is there’s things that centralize power, and they’re bad. There’s things that decentralize power, and they’re good. Everything I can do to help decentralize power, I’d like to do.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
You cannot build a successful AI chip without first writing a competitive machine learning framework — that, not the silicon, is why Google's TPU is the only one that worked.
the only ASIC that is remotely successful is Google’s TPU. The only reason that’s successful is because Google wrote a machine learning framework. I think that you have to write a competitive machine learning framework in order to be able to build an ASIC.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Publishing your source code is not open source; open source is a culture of developing in public and answering your issues.
Just dumping the code on GitHub is not open source. Open source is a culture. Open source means that your issues are not all one year old, stale issues. Open source means developing in public.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Every generation's test for machine intelligence is whatever machines cannot do yet, so in twenty years the question will be whether it can reproduce.
The problem is if you go back to 1960 and you tell them that you have a machine that can play amazing chess, of course someone in 1960 will tell you that machine is intelligent. Someone in 2010 won’t. What’s changed? Today, we think that these machines that have language are intelligent, but I think in 20 years we’re going to be like, yeah, but can it reproduce?
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
AlphaGo and MuZero are far more impressive than large language models, because they play beyond the best humans while the models write middle-school essays.
I think things like MuZero and AlphaGo are so much more impressive because these things are playing beyond the highest human level. The language models are writing middle school level essays and people are like, wow, it’s a great essay.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Automating programming is harder than automating driving, because programming is tool complete and driving is not.
I think driving is not tool complete and programming is. Meaning you don’t use the best possible tools to drive. Cars have basically the same interface for the last 50 years. Computers have a radically different interface.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
If Copilot is meaningfully helping you write code, that is evidence your framework or library is bad and full of boilerplate.
So almost if Codex or copilot are helping you, that actually probably means that your framework or library is bad and there’s too much boilerplate in it.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Future language models will be smaller and loop on themselves with a retrieval system, which is what will finally let them cite their sources.
I think future LLMs are going to be smaller, but are going to run looping on themselves and are going to have retrieval systems. And the thing about using a retrieval system is you can cite sources, explicitly.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
The off-switch everyone imagines for AI does not exist, for the same reason nobody in the world is capable of shutting Google down.
Everyone who talks about AI talks about the button, the button to turn it off, right? Do we have a button to turn off Google? Is anybody in the world capable of shutting Google down?
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
AI safety advocates will build the very thing they fear: one controlled, aligned model is the only route to being turned into paperclips.
What’s ironic about all these AI safety people is they’re going to build the exact thing they fear. We need to have one model that we control and align. This is the only way you end up paper clipped. There’s no way you end up paper clipped if everybody has an AI.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Arguing that nobody should have powerful AI is a respectable position; arguing that only trusted authorities should have it is not.
And I will respect someone philosophically with that position, just like I will respect someone philosophically with the position that nobody should have guns. But I will not respect philosophically with, “Only the trusted authorities should have access to this.”
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
The business world is the moral inverse of the hacking world, because business is a world that promotes psychopathy.
I came into the business world with Comma, and I found the exact opposite. I found 5% of people good and 95% of people bad. I found a world that promotes psychopathy.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Charging users money is the fix for social media, because a paying user is the customer rather than the product.
As soon as you charge people money, they’re no longer the product, they’re the customer. And then they can start building something that’s good for the customer, and not good for the other customer, which is the ad agencies.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Recommendation algorithms are not sinister; they simply predict engagement, and what humans engage with most is outrage.
It just predicts what you are likely to re-Tweet and like, and linger on. That’s what all these algorithms do. It’s what Tik-Tok does, it’s what all these recommendation engines do. And it turns out that the thing that you are most likely to interact with is outrage. And that’s a quirk of the human condition.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Twitter needed refactors before features: a code base that bad has to be fixed before anything new is built on top of it.
So, my technical recommendation to Elon, and I said this on the Twitter spaces afterward, I said this many times during my brief internship, was that you need re-factors before features.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
The first move on a legacy code base is tests you can trust, before a single line of the code itself is changed.
I mean, the first thing that I would do is build tests. The first thing I would do is get a CI to where people can trust to make changes. Before I touched any code, I would actually say, “No one touches any code. The first thing we do is we test this code base.”
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Trading the oligarchy that currently runs America for a monarchy under Elon Musk would be a trade worth making.
But I mean, would I trade right now the current oligarchy which runs America for the monarchy? Yeah, I would. Sure. For the Elon monarchy, yeah.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
What a programmer actually wants from AI is not autocomplete but a pair programmer that tells you which line has the bug.
But the real thing that I want is not something that like tab completes my code and gives me ideas. The real thing that I want is a very intelligent pair programmer that comes up with a little popup saying, “Hey, you wrote a bug on line 14 and here’s what it is.”
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
An AI you rent from a big company in the cloud is fundamentally aligned to that company and not to you, which is why the hardware has to be yours.
Of course, when you talk to an AI that’s made by a big company in the cloud, the AI fundamentally is aligned to them, not to you. And that’s why you have to buy a tiny box. So you make sure the AI stays aligned to you.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Atheism is silly: anyone who has built a world inside a game should be able to see that this one was created too.
So it struck me one day how just silly atheism is. Of course, we were created by God. It’s the most obvious thing.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Social and advertising businesses come and go; a technology company that wants to endure has to build hardware.
The two companies that have endured through technology are Apple and Microsoft. And what do they make? Computers and business services, right. All the meme, social ads, they all come and go. But you want to endure, build hardware.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Utilitarianism is an abhorrent ideology, because it licenses killing three people to save a thousand.
Utilitarianism is an abhorrent ideology. Well, yeah, we’re going to kill those three people to save a thousand, of course, right.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
Survival can be guaranteed without a universal basic income, by making housing, food and above all energy dirt cheap.
You can make survival guaranteed without UBI. What you have to do, is make housing and food dirt cheap. Right? And that’s the good world. And actually, let’s go into what we should really be making dirt cheap, which is energy.
George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 Said 29 Jun 2023
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
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